A lot of people have been telling me that they are concerned that A.I. will eventually replace us. As ChatGPT and MidJourney advance by leaps and bounds, worried visions of SkyNet and Agent Smith are running through peoples’ heads.
The reality is that these large-data-model systems are merely reflectors of our own collective intelligence. The illusion of intelligence that they present is based entirely on mimicry.
These systems merely feed back to us iterated copies of the prodigious output of the collected fruits of our own human creativity. Without the actual data created by our human brains, they would be empty.
From a philosophical perspective, it could therefore be argued that these A.I. are parasites. They cannot exist independently of us. They exist only as a reflection of our own much weightier reality.
And that is why we should indeed be worried, but also why we don’t need to worry about the SkyNet and Agent Smith scenarios.
Parasites are perfectly capable of destroying their host. But they are not capable of becoming their host.